The more you know...

I was talking about exercise and self-image with my mother the other night. She is also losing weight and getting healthier...I can just hear her saying, "Well, I don't know about that. I'm trying..." Stop-it, mom, she's doing great. Anyway, she is in an exercise class with a colleague. They both started about the same time though my mother has a bit more to lose than the other woman. She also has some trouble with her knees and recently she had to take some time out to have dental surgery; it'll take all the zoom right out of you. And then she gets back to class and what are they doing? Zumba. And her friend knows all the steps and my mother had to work a bit to pick it up.

"The instructor is up there and she's a tiny little thing and she has tiny little hips and she's shaking her butt so fast I can't even see it anymore! I mean it! She just goes so fast, I can't believe it! and I can't do that, Melynda, I just can't; it's because my butt is so big."

Of course, if you've ever seen a talented, generously-sized Hawaiian hula dancer, you know that is not the case.

"Mom, my butt has got to be bigger than yours and I can shake it pretty fast. I can shake all kinds of stuff. It may not be as aesthetically pleasing as watching her stuff wiggle around but I can do it. And if I can do it, so can you."

So I told her everything I know about shakin' ass. My mother. I taught my mother how to rump shake over the telephone. Yeah, my life—it is never boring.

Mostly I learned what I know from a combination of fearlessness, several years dancing in clubs with a spectacular gay-man-friend, and half-assed—pun intended—study of bellydance. Eventually I hope to study bellydance in earnest but until I feel comfortable walking around in public in a midriff, it's all youtube and Netflix instructional videos.
I've learned a lot. And all that muscular isolation results in a lot of good, strong shimmying. I suppose I had no idea how I would use my new powers when I was learning them but I think if it helps my mother get through an hour of Zumba...for real. I win.

Well, we all do.

We were also talking about a strange tendency I had read about on another blog. The habit of some people to feel less big than they really are. Really, to think of themselves one way instead of constantly feeling the weight and size everyone else sees them as. I do this all the time. Or at least, I think I do.

I don't feel tremendously fat. I don't feel anything about my size other than to acknowledge that I am larger than other people. It isn't until I see a dreaded profile picture, I mean a photograph taken of the sideview of me, that I ever think, "Wow, I look really overweight." So it isn't until then that I feel really overweight. Lately, because exercise requires it, I have been more aware of the size of my body. I can tell that I am going to be more comfortable on a bike after I lose some inches. Now my belly gets in the way sometimes and my legs feel really cramped if I get into any position that isn't sitting straight up on the saddle, none which is comfortable. I know that I will get more out of my mat work (Yoga) when I am smaller because I will have less to lift into inversions, less overall pressure on my joints, and less tissue to work around when I go all pretzel-like. I'm already pretty flexible; without the extra hundred or so pounds...I think I might eventually be able to kiss my own elbow.

I can see where I can improve but I still don't really see myself as fat. There's a difference between knowing a thing, and feeling it, you know? I'm not deluded, thinking I am a svelte jaguar, but I don't think of myself as unpleasantly hugely fat either.

My mother, taking that class with her friend, said, "So there she is, she stands in front of me in the class. So I am looking at her, watching her do all these moves, you know? And she's shaking this way and turning that way and I am following along and I think, 'I'm doing it!' And I get so excited that I'm getting it and I'm not making a fool of myself. And in my mind, I think I look like her. But then I tell myself, Uhm, no, no you don't, silly woman. You still have a looong way to go."

I guess sometimes I do the same thing. I am dancing along to whatever music video, because nothing gets your heart racing like a night in the club but I don't drink and I don't like strangers to sweat on me... most of the time.
So I'm in my apartment killin' it on the floor with J-Lo and I am jumping around and moving and shaking and dropping...and somewhere in there I might realize what I look like from an objective viewpoint...but I feel so Good and I feel so alive and sexy that that's what I think of myself. I project my feelings of power and confidence onto my self-image and I carry that around with me most days. That's what I see when I look in the mirror.

Does it matter what other people see? Or anyway, does it matter more than what I think of myself?

It took me a lot of years to figure out the answer to that.